- Teacher: Jihye Park
Comparative politics asks why political life is organized so differently across countries and what follows from those differences. This course is built for students who expect to work on policy questions. Every week pairs a body of comparative research with the kind of question a policy analyst actually faces, so that the theory earns its place by explaining something a practitioner needs to know.
The course covers states and state capacity, regime types and their measurement, democratization and democratic erosion, constitutional and electoral design, parties and representation, voting behavior and populism, interest group influence, welfare states, the institutional roots of development, political violence, and the domestic politics of globalization.